Michael Robotham: I’ve killed 64 people so far – this is how my life in violent crime began

How did a bright, churchgoing son of a country schoolteacher finish up as a literary serial killer?

Michael Robotham’s latest book follows him back to his roots. Picture: Tony Mott

I have killed around 64 people in the course of my career. I can’t be absolutely sure of the number unless I dig up the bodies and count them.

They have been stabbed, shot, electrocuted, frozen, bludgeoned, speared, squashed, hanged, crushed, run-down, burned, buried and incinerated – and I still haven’t finished. Lead a life like mine and you’re under constant pressure to keep the bodies coming.

I am often asked when my life of crime began. How did a bright, churchgoing son of a country schoolteacher finish up as a literary serial killer?

I can see the progression.

At 18, straight out of school, I began work as a cadet journalist on an afternoon newspaper, the Sydney Sun, rival to The Daily Mirror. These two tabloid red-tops were the most competitive newspapers in the world, according to Rupert Murdoch.

Sensation and titillation were their currency, which included page-three girls, newspaper bingo, rugby league, racing guides and a daily diet of crime stories and celebrity ­gossip.

My first front page appeared in October 1979 – a domestic violence murder where a husband had punched his new bride of three weeks after seeing her kiss another man. Forty-six years on and little has changed when it comes to men killing their partners.

As a cadet reporter, I worked in the radio room, monitoring the police, fire and ambulance radios that scanned the emergency frequencies. I learned the call-signs and codes. I knew which police division operated in which areas of Sydney, and when an officer was in trouble, or a prisoner had escaped, or a child was missing, or a suspect was being chased.

Justice David Opas was shot to death in the courtyard of his Woollahra home in 1980.

When family court judge David Opas was shot at point-blank range at his Woollahra home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs in June 1980, I was nearby, with a driver and photographer. We arrived before the first ambulance crews and found Opas lying near his front gate as his wife, Kristin, a trained nurse, tried to stem the bleeding until paramedics took over. I had never felt so helpless. It would happen often in my career.

That crime remained unsolved for 40 years, until Leonard Warwick, 73, a former firefighter, was found guilty, ending a reign of terror against the Family Court.

For 12 months I worked the graveyard shift for The Sun. There was only one other reporter awake at that hour – my rival on The Mirror, Mike Munro, who later moved to TV.

Kings Cross became my regular haunt because it was the only place to get a coffee or something to eat at three in the morning. I befriended pimps, prostitutes, dealers, junkies, coppers, strippers, transvestites, tramps, and “colourful local identities” – a ­euphemism for gangsters and nightclub owners.

Early one morning, I had a phone call from Raymond John Denning, Australia’s second most wanted man. Denning had been serving a life sentence for savagely bashing a prison warder when he hid amid prison garbage and became the first inmate in 80 years to escape from Grafton Jail.

I don’t know how Denning got my number, but there weren’t many journalists awake at that hour. We didn’t talk for long that first night. He complained about police verbals and “unsigned statements” and being “stitched up” before suddenly hanging up, perhaps worried his call might be traced.

Career criminal Raymond John Denning in a 1973 police photo.

He rang again a few nights later, and again and again. For three months, we conversed. At various times he sounded desperate, victimised, abused and indignant, but he also sounded genuine.

Rather than keep a low profile, Denning ridiculed the police at every opportunity. He sent tapes to radio stations and provided reviews of the latest movies. He sat in the public gallery during question time at NSW state parliament and went to a prisoner’s art show at East Sydney Technical College, mingling with judge Michael Kirby and two Long Bay prison officers.

On July 26, 1980, Denning walked up the front steps of the NSW police headquarters in Sydney and taped a goading letter to the glass door, putting his palm prints on either side.

He phoned me immediately and I raced to the scene, getting photographs before the police could take it down.

These stunts continued until the early hours of November 12 when shots were fired at the guard towers at Parramatta Jail. I heard the callout and woke a photographer. Before I could leave the office, the phone rang. A man read from a prepared statement. An organisation called the Reform Justice Devils was claiming responsibility for the shooting. I wrote down the details and noticed the initials. R.J.D. – Raymond John Denning.

“Is that you Ray?” I asked.

“No.”

“C’mon Ray, I recognise your voice.”

‘It’s the Reform Justice Devils.”

Denning hung up, and I didn’t hear from him again.

Raymond John Denning, pictured after a life on the run.

He was recaptured in November 1981, nineteen months after his escape. His girlfriend had gone to collect him from the Manly ferry. As the two of them waited at a set of traffic lights, a man in a straw hat and swimmers approached the car and put a pistol in Denning’s face before he could reach the handgun stashed beneath the seat.

Australia’s second most wanted man had been living in a flat overlooking Mona Vale Golf Course (only a few kilometres from where I live now). Inside the flat, police found a .357 magnum and three rifles.

Although I didn’t realise it then, Denning fed my fascination with crime and criminals. He was 30 years old. I was 21. And I wanted to understand what made us different. What were the sliding door moments that sent him down one path and me down the other?

I am still trying to answer that question after 19 novels.

My latest one, The White Crow, features a young, ambitious police officer, Philomena McCarthy, who has defied the odds to follow her dream, because she comes from a notorious family of East End gangsters. It is a book that takes me back to my roots – to those early days as a reporter, working the night shift when I befriended prostitutes, pimps, paramedics, police, gangsters and loan sharks and the entire colourful milieu of characters who inhabited the night.

For a short while, they became my people and I’m still telling their stories.

The White Crow by Michael Robotham.

The White Crow by Michael Robotham is published by Sphere on June 25.